Google Docs Adds Hindi Voice Dictation, Research Tool and More

This week has indeed been a busy one for those at Google. After having unveiled the new logo, Google has now introduced many new features, at the very right time when a new academic year for the Americans begins. The feature will now let users type an essay or assignment just by dictating.

The new feature is called “voice typing” and has been added to Google Docs. All you have to do to check it out is, just open a new document, click on the Tools menu and select “Voice typing.” Once done, you need to click on the microphone tab and get started. As per Google, this function will support 40 different languages. For the love of Indian users, it will even support Hindi.

To all up to all this, Google has even added some powerful new features to its cloud-based office suite. This step is certainly going to make some applications more appealing to those in the classroom. However, what we see as a negative here is that Google Docs word processor is not yet set in place for Android. The only way to access it is by desktop users who use Google Chrome’s browser.

Going ahead with the voice-typing feature, it will only type what you say. The drawback here is that it cannot tell you what punctuation marks are needed or where they are to be placed. As the user dictates the text in the content, he will even have to dictate where commas, periods and other punctuation marks are to be placed. This would probably be the ideal format for people who just take down running notes.

Google has also added some interesting updates to slides and sheets. The Android App of Google Docs will now allow you to pull in facts, quotes, images and more from Google search. Google Sheets also features innovative visualization tools for all of data display and the company has added pre-designed templates for Google Sheets, Docs and Slides.

The company states that the new feature is targeted towards classrooms. The ‘research’ feature will allow the user to surf the web, and while doing this, the user wouldn’t have to minimize the word processor application and switch to the browser.

This will indeed be a good add on to those students who do not use desktops or laptops, but tablets in classrooms. The population of such users is on a high currently because of the low budget tablets being widely available in markets. The SafeSearch would be on by default and only the images that are tagged as “licensed for reuse” will show up in search results. Now this one looks similar to the one that Microsoft employed for Bing search images from office suite.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information,” said Google Apps for Education product management director Jonathan Rochelle. “That is especially true for students and teachers.” The new benefits we believe will not only be of benefit to students, but a large audience who uses Google Docs as they can now give fingers a break!

Will these improvements by Google boost your productivity – Do give it a try and let us know what you feel!